3:37 AM …

… and the deeply cratered southern lunar highlands have slipped below the upper edge of the skylight in my room. The rectangle of bright light from the full February moon has been sliding up the covers of my bed and now moves onto my pillow and into my eyes, waking me.

I estimate that the slice of skylight I can see from the angle of my bed equals not quite two of the moon’s diameters. I decide to watch the bright beacon descend on its westward trajectory as long as I can keep my eyes open. I manage the task, watching the moon crawl slowly down through the spidered tips of the trees in the back yard. I can actually see it move. Which is thrilling. By 4:45, nothing is left but a soft glow at the bottom of the frame emanating from the now-hidden moon. I am tempted to go downstairs to watch it continue its journey, but I know from that lower angle it will be lost in the tangle of trees and the houses on the street behind my house. So I go back to sleep.

I’ve always been confounded by the movement of the moon. It’s never in the same place night after night. I recently took a wonderful class at the Natural History Museum, All Things Moon, and learned a lot. The moon moves approximately its own diameter each hour against the background of the stars – or a little more than .5 degrees along its orbit around the earth. It takes about 27 1/3 days for the moon to complete an orbit while the earth keeps spinning/rotating. 360 degrees divided by 27.3 days = 13.2. So the moon rises and sets 13.2 degrees to the west each day and moves .5 degrees against the stars each hour of the day/night. There’s a reasonably clear explanation of it all here, but it still makes my head spin.

Does the moon stun you, as it does me? As long as I can remember I have been fascinated with it. Some years ago I wrote a poem that tried to capture that stunned feeling and it was chosen in a contest that was part of a local effort to put poetry on city buses. Here’s the bus card that was produced.

The artwork was done by then Kent State Design Studio student Alexandra Charitan. I was a little upset that the image of the moon was reversed from what we see, but also learned from my class at the Museum, that photographs taken through certain kinds of telescopes reversed the image. The good thing, though, was that the big red lips ended up exactly over the Mare Nubium (Sea of Clouds) mentioned in the poem; the dark basalt plain in the southern hemisphere that I always imagined was the singer’s mouth. Here’s the poem:

Night Song

The moon, sudden as a door slam,

rang the night awake.

The Aztecs saw a rabbit there.

For me, a singer croons.

A lunar anthem sounding

from the cloud-less mouth

of Mare Nubium; its tone

the perfect ‘A’ of Mozart’s clarinet.

Interestingly, since I wrote that poem I don’t see the ‘man in the moon’ singing anymore, as I once did. It’s rabbits every night. What do you see?

I don’t know why I am so fascinated with the moon. It just seems an impossible, magical thing, hanging up there in the sky. You’d think that, with all we now know about it the romance of the moon would diminish. But for me, it’s only grown.

Through the All Things Moon course, delightfully taught by the Museum’s deeply knowlegeable Shafran Observatory Manager, Clyde Simpson, I learned just how unique and symbiotic our Earth-Moon system is. In the massive collision of another planet (appropriately named Theia, in Greek mythology, a Titan goddess and mother of the moon goddess Selene), into our own 4.5 billion years ago, we acquired our mighty heart of iron. In return we blasted and spun off fragmented elements of our crust which coalesced over time into the shining rock, locked in its orbit around us each day. We are, in fact, geologic twins, or at least siblings.

Our world and life as we know it would not be possible without the companionable influence of our moon. The fact that it is moving away from us a tiny, tiny bit every year worries me.

“The Moon continues to spin away from the Earth, at the rate of 3.78cm (1.48in) per year, at about the same speed at which our fingernails grow.”Dr. Maggie Alderin-Pocock